What Was Tested

Testers– the two testers used were my workhorse, WebPage Test, and Google PageSpeed Insights (GPSI), as their Lighthouse results are more accurate now.

(See the section Full Testing Conditions below for more.)

For Function – Each plugin was checked on multiple points that affect speed, security, and any negative impact that could affect ranking, including:

Number of requests added – extra elements required to load like CSS, JS, and fonts

Page weight added – how many bytes those extra elements added

GPSI score – how much the plugin dropped the score (my test site had a score of 100)

GPSI criteria – in Opportunities, Diagnostics, and Audits passed

Other Functions – items that do not affect speed or security directly, but are important.

GDPR compliance – if the plugin used any type of tracking on those who shared

Extra Pinterest features – for setting specific images or other Pinterest-only functions

For Fashion – the top 4 plugins were checked for:

Style options

Placement options

Turn on/off buttons

Extra options

Full Report

The 120 page report, plus full spreadsheet of all critical data, is available to my Webmaster Training members as a bonus. That includes:

all speed data

screenshots of all performance data

the exact requests added

any orphaned files/folders/database tables left after the plugin was deleted

Test Results

I won’t keep you in suspense any longer.

Here is a snapshot of the best performing free share button plugins based on my test criteria.

One is in the list twice, and I’ll tell you why in the review of it.

See below for a review on each plugin.

Plugin Review – Things to Know First

Here are a few things to know before you read through the plugin results.

A few acronyms used:

CSS – Cascading Style Sheet – for how it looks

JS – JavaScript – for how it works

Font – could be Font Awesome from the outside, or a .woof font that is stored locally

About extra JSMost of the plugins that contain JS files also invoke the two JS files native to WordPress. This way WP carries the bulk of the code library and the plugins can remain light.

However, it does increase the total number of requests and page weight. But, it’s likely that other plugins, or even your theme, will be calling in those two files too, so I didn’t hold it against any of the plugins in my evaluation.

Caching for more speedA good local caching plugin, like WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket, can help defer and speed up the extra CSS and JS and font files most of these plugins contain. But, no caching was used in these tests to keep everything on the same, raw level.

Share CountsDisplaying counts slows down the site, have not been accurate in 2 years, and no longer encourages more shares. For these tests, they were turned off.

Social Warfare

This plugin provides good looking buttons with lots of extra features.

It does add a little weight to the page in the form of its own:

1 CSS

1 JS

1 .woof font

But, it is done in a way that has zero impact on the GPSI score, even without extra caching help.

You don’t have many setting choices for the look of the buttons, but fortunately most folks like the default.

The plugin also supports choices for:

Placement – above/below/both and shortcode for manual placement

Turn on/off buttons by content type, including page/post/category – there is no setting to turn off on a per page/post basis. The only remedy is to maybe turn off for all pages and use the shortcode to add them only on the pages you want.

Gutenberg blocks – affects the manually placed shortcodes

Frame Buster – to stop scrapers from embedding your site into theirs as an iframe

Full Content vs. Excerpts – if your theme and/or SEO plugin do not already support it (Genesis and Yoast SEO do)

Floating share buttons – tracks down the side of the page as the visitor scrolls

Click to Tweet

Share counts – one of the few plugins that includes aggregation when switching from HTTP to HTTPS

The free version has no extra Pinterest support.

The plugin adds no tracking and is GDPR compliant.

Recommendation: This plugin is great when it works and offers more features for lighter weight and faster speed than any other.

My ONLY hesitation in recommending this plugin is that it has a reputation of breaking sites on update. I honestly don’t know if that’s only due to complexity of the paid version, or includes this free version too. The plugin has been rebuilt 3-4 times from scratch, including splitting off this free version, which must be used in conjunction with the paid version. Too many of my clients have jumped ship on it, never to return, even if the devs get the issues fixed permanently. The plugin not working is one thing. Breaking the whole site is another.

Shared Counts

This plugin is made by Bill Erickson, long known as a Genesis coding mentor.

Of all the plugins that adds requests and weight, it is the lowest, but it is done in such a way that it brings down the GPSI score by 3 points. Caching may fix that.

It adds its own:

1 CSS

1 JS

The plugin also supports:

Multiple styling options and button types/shapes

A large array of social platform buttons – more than most, and includes Yummly for foodie blogs

Placement – above/below/both and shortcode for manual placement

Turn buttons off for all pages/posts and on a per page/post basis

Share counts – one of the few plugins that includes aggregation when switching from HTTP to HTTPS

There is no native option to assign a custom Pinterest image, but there is a free add-on plugin.

The plugin adds no tracking and is GDPR compliant.

Recommendation: This is a pretty solid plugin and offers the most style button choices so far.

However, the Twitter button does not include your Twitter handle. Code has to be added for that.

And I wish they would put a preview of the style choices in the plugin, instead of a link to visit the plugin’s page to see them. But honestly, once you set your button look, you keep it. So this is a one-time thing.

I also wish they would include the Pinterest image option instead of making it an add-on. That’s especially important due to the attraction of having a Yummly share button, as foodie bloggers, and their site visitors, are usually big on Pinterest too.

Social Pug

This plugin is one of the lowest for weight and requests added, but it does them in a way that decreases GPSI score by 3 points.

It adds its own:

1 CSS

1 JS

The plugin also supports:

Multiple styling options and button types/shapes

A small array of social platform buttons on the free version

Placement – above/below/both as well as floating buttons on the side – each can be styled separately

Turn buttons off for all pages/posts but no option to turn off on a per page/post basis

Share counts – but no option to aggregate from HTTP/HTTPS

The plugin adds no tracking and is GDPR compliant.

Recommendation: This plugin is solid and the button style choices are totally customizable in many ways. However, this plugin has the least number of platforms available. There are only 5, and will soon be only 4 as Google+ is no longer an option. You have to go up to the paid version to get more.

When I first activated the plugin, there was a notice about Twitter counts being turned off due to the service providing them dragging down page load speed. That’s just one more reason to turn off share counts.

There is also no custom image for Pinterest support in the free version.

If you are okay with the limited number of platforms being only the top 4, this is a good plugin to use.

Honorable Mention

The following plugin didn’t quite make the cut for my recommendation, but it has so much to offer that I’m keeping an eye on it and hope to test it again in the future.

Sassy Social Share

This is actually a pretty cool plugin. It has many of the desired features, and a few extras that make it a real standout, as none of the other free plugins have some of them. They include:

SVG icons that can be customized for free

100+ platform choices

Lots of styling options

Floating buttons

Sharing of Woocommerce products

GDPR compliance

Gutenberg ready

AMP ready

And more

But, it adds too much weight and drops the GPSI score too much for me to recommend at this time.

However, if you need those special features, this may be the right plugin for you, especially considering that a good caching plugin may help.

I also liked that it had an option to cleanly uninstall itself.

I’ll be keeping my eye on this one to see if they can make all of that complexity a little faster.

Other Plugins

I would strongly suggest getting happy with one of the plugins above. The rest of the plugins I tested either added too much weight, dragged down the GPSI score, or were just plain too evil for me to recommend.

Please look through this list and see if you are using one of them and consider switching to a better plugin.

AddToAny

This plugin has come a long way since my last case study in 2014. But, it still has a way to go to make it into my recommended plugins list.

The plugin adds 3 JS files and 1 .html file from their site.

None of those can be cached, so no speed improvements are possible.

I also could not tell if it is still adding a cookie for their tracking purposes, as it did in my 2016 test. I did not find direct evidence of it, so perhaps they have removed it.

AddThis

Don’t use.

It adds multiple hidden elements and tracks folks who share. That practice is couched in the name of giving you extra analytics. Don’t fall for it.

Simple Social Buttons

Don’t use.

Way too much weight and drops your GPSI score by 20 points.

It’s super heavy on outside domain requests from Twitter (5) and Facebook (6) for counts. This is with share counts turned off.

And none of them can be cached, so there is no speed improvement available.

Shareaholic

Don’t use – in fact – run!

This is one of THE most evil plugins available.

Not only do they track your sharing visitors – they run their own ads in the background – LOTS of them.

You must agree to their Terms of Service before using the plugin. It clearly states that all of the data your are providing will be shared with 3rd party vendors. It’s very likely they are selling that data. This is also not at all GDPR compliant.

I literally burned my test site after removing it.

Even though I checked for orphaned stuff between each plugin deletion, I did not trust them not to hide something away in an unexpected place.

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Full Test Conditions

Webmasters – see the Bonus section for full test conditions.
Want to learn how to do tests like this?
Webmaster Training is for designers and devs.

The brief below has the most important aspects of my testing setup, if you want to recreate the tests for yourself, or check your variation in results against the ones given.

Apache – This is the slowest type of server, compared to Apache/Nginix and Litespeed.

No local caching plugin

Cloudflare – for security

default caching on

all extra speed tweaks disabled like Brotli, Minify

Email obfuscation was turned off, but still gave an extra request inconsistently, which was ignored in the final request count

WordPress 5.0.3

Gutenberg active

TwentyNineteen theme

No active widgets that pulled requests

Test post with FakerPress dummy content

Main body of content was imported into a Classic Paragraph block

Large featured image that also appeared as wide image at top of post

One image embedded in content

Neither image had extra optimization

Share Counts were turned off on each plugin.

Tests run on WebPage Test

Lincoln Nebraska, Chrome, Cable connection, First and Repeat Views (see this post for how to run a speed test on WPT)

Tests run on Google PageSpeed Insights – Lighthouse version – base test site had perfect score of 100

Between Tests

Each tested plugin was deleted before a new plugin was added.

The hosting account was checked for orphaned:

Files

Folders

Database tables

Rows in wp_options table

Cloudflare cache was fully purged.

A new post was created for each test, to ensure the testers didn’t cache the results on any permalink.

About MaAnna Stephenson

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English. She helps DIY site owners plus webmasters and designers create sites that are secure, perform well, and get noticed by search engines and readers.

Reader Interactions

Comments

I wanted to add that since I have had the Social Warfare plugin now for a few years, there has only been that one major problem in an update. But they were right on it and fixed it quickly. There have been a few updates since then with no problems.

Thank you MaAnna. Social Sharing is one of the functions users try on their blogs. It is so important to read this article. Bloggers need to STOP following advice of other bloggers about their “have to have” plugins. No blog or goal are equal. This is a great article for users to know what is happening with a plugin that is installed. I am definitely sharing this post in all my groups.

Thanks for the tip on ESSB. Looks like they are very speed conscious. I pretty much stuck to the ones that my clients reported using and/or other super popular ones for this go round. My catch that one in the next round.

Do you have an opinion on Sumo’s social sharing? I realize this isn’t a plugin. I was using whatever they call their social sharing and also their Image Sharer. I recently removed them and didn’t see a speed increase, even though others have said they slow your site.

Glad to hear you got rid of that evil plugin. It really does take a tech to get the orphans out, as they are mostly in the database and deep files/folders. I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving out that info publicly and someone blowing up their site because of not knowing how to be super careful with it.

Jay from Shareaholic here. Just read this review from a few months ago. :/

In my opinion, I believe you arrived at incorrect conclusions in your review about Shareaholic. If you’re up for it, I’ve love to learn from your findings (and your underlying test data), which hopefully improves the product and maybe clears any misunderstandings. I hope you agree to do so. — [email protected]

We’re a small team (6 people) that loves making products used by hundreds of thousands of sites that people (hopefully) love and not some evil corporation!

—- Point-by-point thoughts on some points you bring up —

1. No plugin settings are left behind in the WP DB once you delete the WP plugin. You can examine the plugin code to verify. It’s open source on wordpress.org. I’m not sure how you arrived at this conclusion as it is not technically possible unless the DB is corrupted in some way preventing standard WP hooks from working…

**Can you please share details with me.**

2. Shareaholic Analytics is GDPR compatible. No PII is logged for EU/EEAA visitors, including automatic anonymization of IP address by zeroing the last octet (IPv4) or 80 bits (IPv6) before any logging. IP addresses are considered PII under GDPR. (link removed by admin)

3. Shareaholic offers a Monetization program (similar to Mediavine). No Ads are hidden… The ads are used by site owners to make a living…

(link removed by admin)

4. In May 2019, Kinsta reviewed Shareaholic (which includes a speed test) and found that it adds just ~15ms to load time. (link removed by admin). WPEngine also recommends Shareaholic as a fast solution.

It sounds like you may have speed tested the plugin with all our 14+ apps enabled at the same time! This would be similar to testing a site with Mediavine, Share Buttons, Related Posts, Cookie Bar, etc all at the same time vs. a more apples-apples comparison of narrowing down the test to just the Share Buttons functionality. These can be configured in the settings.

We try to make every setting clear, obvious and easy to configure. *We* obviously failed here. The settings should have been cleared to you.

We know it can frequently be inconvenient (and confusing) that settings are split between Shareaholic.com AND WP plugin interface. To address this, in May 2019 we rolled out a large update with a brand new onboarding flow for WP that helps you customize your settings upfront vs. turning on all.the.apps, which wasn’t a great experience.

(link removed by admin)

**Would love for you to take a look on a test site.**

– YES, Shareaholic’s JavaScript payload IS large when just Share Buttons are enabled. This is a fair criticism and we’re actively working on slimming it down as this also dings the Google PageSpeed Mobile score. On Desktop, Shareaholic scores 95+ on GPSI using a setup similar to what you describe with just Share Buttons turned on.

That said, the payload issue is somewhat mitigated because of the way Shareaholic is delivered and its reach across 200,000 sites. Unlike the other plugins in the article you list above, since Shareaholic is designed platform agnostic (you can run Shareaholic on Shopify, Drupal, Blogger, etc), it runs almost completely on the client-side via JavaScript, unlike the other plugins that more PHP code to do server-side rendering and hence have slimmer JavaScript. JavaScript will increase User Time (as code is loaded and evaluated async), but load time should be tight. Also, since it’s JS driven and loaded from a central Global CDN (stackpath), chances are that the code is already cached in your browser from one of the other 200,000+ sites that is running Shareaholic, making it fast. This is something that GPSI doesn’t take into consideration, but WebPage Test does if you run the average across 3 tests.

I’ll be more than happy to share my test data, as I did with other devs. And it is what I saw when I simply activated the plugin and set up sharing which is what I bet 99% of site owners do.

Maybe you should consider turning all those modules off by default and letting folks turn on what they need instead of overloading their site with things they did’t want or need or even realize was happening like the ads and tracking. I hope that’s what the new onboarding experience is.

Would be even better to split off a sharing plugin, as that’s all most folks want or use it for. And let them upgrade into a bigger plugin if they want the rest.

And the TOS doesn’t inspire confidence either.

I ran multiple tests on WPT and took caching factors into consideration for things like common fonts and JS files that are loaded by the theme or other plugins. The tests and analysis are super deep, as you will see.

I looked at my notes and see that only 1 row is left behind in the options table of the database.

I don’t get paid by anybody to take 3 months every year for the last 5-6 years to run these deep speed tests on hosts, themes, and plugins such as caching, recipes, share buttons, and more.

They are to keep me in the know and advise my site audit clients on speed and security. The 400 page reports are also available to my webmaster members so they can properly advise their clients on same. And available to devs and hosts on their wares if they want them.

Those tests are also independently verified by those webmasters in their own setups. And I’ve helped countless devs and hosts improve their products over the years.

I stand behind my test data, as do the others who make use of that data and come to similar results.

Reviewed items change all the time, but I can’t afford to do these deep tests more than once a year. Happy to share the test I did. If you want others ahead of next year’s testing, you’re welcome to hire me to produce them.

There are way too many share button options to use a plugin that is overloaded with anything but sharing and the things directly related to it.

I ran a new quick set of tests to see the new workflow. The description of the plugin in the WP repo passes the plugin off as primarily share buttons and other on-site engagement. It says absolutely nothing about the ads, or the TOS and Privacy Policy that specifically state how the site owners data will be shared with 3rd parties for your gain.

In the new setup workflow, I explicity checked the boxes for the plugin’s use to be sharing only related.

Yet, the ads and other affiliate link things were still turned on by default.

And while the plugin is faster now than the initial tests, it’s not about speed for me anymore. It’s about the deceptive practices and not fully, and clearly warning folks what they are signing up for ahead of time.

Long time follower here and am a recent user so I thought I’d chime in. I feel this is a bit of an over the top reaction… the optional ad stuff didn’t suprise me. I thought the description and setup screens were clear.

As a recent user, you may not be aware of how many man hours go into these tests so you can have deeply vetted info for free.

You may also not have experienced the dumpster fire some of these plugins create on a site when they go haywire, and the cost of that cleanup.

So, what you consider an over-the-top-reaction is actually quite mild to the meltdown some site owners have been through over having a bad plugin.

And I hope you never have to experience that because you are a long-time follower of mine. That’s my job – to help DIY site owners avoid the expensive pitfalls and have sites that are fast and secure.

As far as an optional ad stuff, no idea what you mean. And if there were any type of monetization on the post such as an affiliate link for something I use and recommend to my clients, it MAY earn enough to buy me a cup of coffee. It most certainly would not recompense me for the man hours to do the test, much less provide the info to the public. The only way I eat is when someone buys a service like a site audit, and I EARN that money with the work I do for them.

I hope you will reconsider your comments and the cost to me of making info available for you to use for free, whether you ever hire me or not.

I removed all the links you shared and put a note in the comments as such. I’ll be damned if I’ll let you use my good name and site authority to advertise your deceitful plugin. If we play that game, then I will include the multiple links to review posts all the way back to at least 2013 of how you snuck ads in on unsuspecting bloggers. Those reviews also include how you reached out to them the same way you have me, not only here, but in blogger groups, to try to convince them that you are working on the issues to make them better. If it were up to me, I’d have your deceitful plugin ripped out of the WP plugin repository. And if you keep after me about it, I’ll be more than happy to do a standalone post, with full test data, links to all those reviews, warning folks in a much bigger way about why they should not use this plugin. I’ll also reach out to WPEngine and Kinsta with that test data too and let them know how they are tarnishing their good name by promoting this plugin in any way.

I’ve been using Shareaholic Plugin for years now… It’s reasonably simple and works out of the box. The developers are constantly updating it as well which is always a good sign. Very happy with it. Caveat – I don’t use their monetization options (which I’ve found easy to customize) and primarily use the plugin for social sharing and related posts. After reading this post, I gave the other plugins a look. But I am sticking with my beloved Shareaholic. It gives me more than the others in one package and looks so much better.

Shareaholic had a bad patch 3-4 years ago where they rushed new products out, but they apologized and fixed. For the past few years, I can validate that Shareaholic has worked great. Exceptional support! I use it on 3 sites (2 wordpress and 1 Shopify) and I really owe them, as they were able to pull a few strings to get one of my sites unblocked by Facebook..

As long as you know that they are still slipping in these ads and links and such to unsuspecting new users, and you’re okay with their continuing deceitful practices, then fine. I just can’t support such practices with any sort of endorsement or use.

I wouldn’t either if that was the case, but I haven’t personally experienced what you’re saying… I am sure of it. For what it is worth I have verified with my tech guy to be sure. I have been making some good money from their monetization tools on 1 of my sites, nothing to retire or anything like that but it’s something. I do not have Ads or link monetization turned on the other 2. It’s been quite pleasant and clear, plus they took the extra time to help me with facebook!!

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Hi! I'm MaAnna, and a geek who can still speak in plain English. I help DIY site owners plus webmasters and designers create sites that are secure, perform well, and get noticed by search engines and readers. How May I Help You?

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